Measuring online video marketing success

Written by Alfred Ruth, product manager, Video Plaza and Camilla Day, head of video on demand, PHD

What is the best way of tracking and measuring video advertising?

The way you track, measure and report your campaign must be decided upfront and depends on your campaign objectives. You can use brand tracking, online metrics or both.

The type of ad format you use will also be important. A pre-roll is best measured on the number of people that see it and brand tracking. Interactive ads or a player skin can be measured on dwell time and interaction rates.

Use this section to help pick two or three relevant metrics that are linked to your objectives.

Brand tracking

Video advertising, particularly advertising around on-demand clips and programs, can be measured in a similar way to TV and cinema. Research companies like DynamicLogic can measure brand uplift (increases in the relationship between your brand and your consumers). Therefore, you should consider using the following:

• Awareness: shows if there has been uplift in the number of people that know about your brand or product.

• Favourability / perception: shows if there has been a positive uplift or change in consumer opinion.

• Consideration: shows if there has been an increase in the number of consumers thinking about buying or using your brand.

• Message association: shows if there has been uplift in the association of a message to your brand. E.g. when fuel companies advertise about their environmental credentials.

Online metrics

Online metrics are vital for measuring delivery and reach. Video ads are served through ad servers in the same way display banner ads normally are, and hence, a few metrics derived from banner ads are still relevant.

• Delivery / impressions: the number of unique browsers / computers that an ad has been served to.

• Reach: the number of individuals in an audience reached by an advert. Offline, this is an estimate , online is far more accurate.

• Clickthrough rate: the share of impressions that led to a click that redirected the user to the advertiser's site.

Besides these standard metrics, there are a few more metrics unique to online video advertising:

• Frequency: while you can set the number of times an advert is repeated in a set time period on TV , uniquely to the internet , you can limit the number of times an individual sees the ad too.

• Dwell time: total amount of attention in seconds that an ad has generated from users. This can be measured since the ads are served one at a time.

• Drop-off time: how much of the ad did the user see? The data should be broken down at least into quarters of the content duration. You should , for instance , be able to tell what share of the users saw at least half of the ad or more.

Further, several types of online video ads are interactive which means that users can interact with the ads without leaving the video player. There are too many variations to list them all, but some are worth mentioning.

• Interaction rate: adverts that have additional functionality in them like buttons , animations or forms that require people to interact can be measured by interaction rate. You can compare the number of impressions to interactions to find out how successful your ad was at engaging the consumer.

• In-stream overlay click rate: in-stream overlay ads allow people to click on them which can trigger a number of actions such as directing people to the brand website , or opening up more information within the player while pausing the content. The first click of an overlay banner cannot be considered a clickthrough since the user is not always redirected to the advertiser's site immediately. Hence , the clicks on the overlay banner must be counted separately and calculated to reflect the share of impressions that led to a click on the overlay banner.

How do you choose which metric to use?

The type of campaign and its objectives will decide the metrics you need to use:

• Branding campaign: how do you want the relationship between your brand and consumers to change? Do you want more people to know about your brand? Is it your aim to change opinions? Are you looking to increase the likelihood to purchase? Depending on your branding objective, you can use a combination of online metrics (e.g. for reach) and brand tracking (e.g. for brand uplift).

• Response campaign: what type of response do you want , sales , interactions , leads or more people visiting your shops? Response has many different forms. Depending on your response objective , the type of measurement will change. For instance , if you have an interactive ad you can measure the number of times a consumer interacts. If you’re driving leads , you can measure increase in phone and in-shop enquiries as well as online. Don’t rely solely on clickthrough.

The future of video advertising measurement

Advertising in and around video content is still a relatively new format, and while it is building on two established mediums – online and TV – the way in which it is measured will continue to improve in the coming years. For instance, at the moment publishers can measure video and while agencies can add tracking pixels to their adverts, there is still room for improvement. Third party adserving allows online measurement at the client side and it is beginning to be adopted for video on demand, following several years of successful implementation for other video formats.

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